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The events that led up to The Crash began with what should have been a routine start-up of the Megaverse, only for all three Anchor candidates for the first section to prove unable to support the highly damaged branch on their own. As a result, Hephaestus, the admin in charge, did a search for a branch which could provide a data patch to help stabilize the next attempt. He found one in "The Story That Never Was".

The Anchor of this unfortunate Loop was put into a fused 'jumpstart' attempt to start the Megaverse looping. This is a process by which data from an existing Loop is used to patch another in the process of activating, helping to stabilize it further than what can otherwise be done. The most notable side effect is a close bond between the activated Loop and the 'donor' that results in a higher than average number of fused Loops between them.

However, problems arose in the Megaverse during this attempt when a viral consciousness composed of multiple villains native to the Megaverse, including but not limited to Dr. Albert W. Wily, captured the visiting Anchor along with all three of the Megaverse's Anchor candidates and strapped them to a device of its own design. The device proved to be a method of artificially inducing Ascension by forcibly taking the metaphysical essence of the four captives as fuel, with the visiting Anchor being the primary focal point. Had Hephaestus not acted and torn the viral consciousness back into its component entities, then not only would both Loops have been lost, then a very dangerous and destructive being would have gained admin-level powers.

Unfortunately, by focusing his efforts on disassembling the viral consciousness and holding the activation attempt together, Hephaestus missed what was happening to the visiting Anchor. As a result, said Anchor was ripped apart at the metaphysical level and their Loop followed in a similar fashion and Yggdrasil suffered a severe system crash as a result.

The reverberations of what would come to be known as The Crash hit pretty much every corner of the multiverse. All Loop iterations that were running at the time suffered immediate and violent termination and the operations of Yggdrasil were thrown into chaos as all admins ran around doing their best to make sure the Loop that was lost ended up being the only Loop that was lost (fortunately, they succeeded in this much).

The aftermath was something of a rushed affair. New iterations were started as quickly as possible and, in an effort to maximize stability, all current loopers were set to Awake status. Not only that, but in a number of Loops new loopers were 'shaken loose' as Yggdrasil's grabs for stability dragged nonloopers into Awake status. Some of these 'Crash Generation' loopers might have eventually Awoken on their own, but some older Loops also gained new loopers for the first time in a very long while as well. Some universes received no new loopers, while others, like the Equestria Loops and the Sonicverse, received several (three and six respectively).

The effects of The Crash are still being felt. For one, some Crash Generation loopers are known to have bugs in their code.

Silver Spoon from Equestria, for example, possesses a loose species marker, meaning she spends more time Awake as a race other than she does as her baseline self.

Vee from the Pokemon Special, had his/her gender marker knocked from male to female, it's quite possible she doesn't even remember her baseline gender, as she's currently dating the Pokemon Anime anchor Pikachu. Speaking of the Pokemon Anime, the image of Ash's Dad in the baseline is gone. He exists, but no Looping person can remember anything noteworthy about him. And the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Loops (Rescue Team, Explorers and Gates to Infinity) were all activated by The Crash, with the all 3 anchors having their species marker knocked loose in such a way that they change species throughout the loops.

Other effects revolve around entire nonlooping branches and how they were affected as a result of this event.

One example is Sam Beckett, whose soul was knocked loose from his own universe when the activation attempt was terminated by The Crash. Without his body. The results from this are two fold: 1)Because Sam is his branch's Anchor, his Loop has been locked to Read-Only until such time as he can be reinserted properly. 2) Sam Loops into other people's bodies as he no longer has one of his own. This comes with that person's Subspace Pocket should they be a looper.

Bariss Offee was similarly knocked loose, having begun looping just as the crash began, her data was corrupted, causing her to constantly loop away from her home universe, and out of the way of general loopers (For instance, looping to Beuxbatons during Hogwarts loops instead of Hogwarts).

Similarly, it was later shown that a third branch of Star Wars loops was created: anchored by Revan and taking place thousands of years before Anakin and Luke.